That was a serious challenge. Not having any "external" ordering for the bigrams (such as, e.g. alphabetically by clue) made this significantly trickier. Knowing there was a baseball theme was the only way I was able to put it together (finding words like "score", "run", "single", "walk-off", etc.) Having the wrong answer for (WI)ELDER - I had RU(ST)LER - also slowed things down a lot, since I couldn't get "winning".

The research half KILLED me, though. Where do people go to get that sort of obscure trivia? (Or, to a true Dodgers fan, is that fact just well-known?!?)

My original puzzle idea was built around the Ethier action figure and involved superhero clues, but I ended up scrapping it. I always had a solution involving his walk-offs, because I figured it would be more or less easy to find info about them, seeing as there had only been 10 total.

I used baseball-reference.com to find the info I needed, but it was tricky to work around the fact that they make you subscribe to get certain specific info.

Just know that I needed to do just as much research as you guys did to find the final answer.

Golem, I tried really hard to find an organic way to place the letter pairs, but I couldn't quite do it. I actually thought finding the word pairs would be too easy, so I made assembling the secret clue difficult.

Josh, forgive my manners - this was a really excellent puzzle! Didn't mean to sound kvetchy about the difficulty. I fully appreciate how hard it is to construct these sort of puzzles within very narrow contraints.

I also did not know how to find Dre's first walk-off single. I had to do a fairly complicated Baseball-Reference search and look through box scores one by win (home game wins where Ethier gets at least 1 single and 1 RBI). Was there an easier way?

It tells you how many game-ending RBI per season. I knew he had 10 total: 1 this year, and 6 last year. The site told me he had 0 in '06 and '07. That meant the first three were all in '08. You have to pay to see which games the RBI happened in, but it was pretty easy to deduce from the scores on the home schedule. (And because I knew he had two of them fairly close together in the second half and that those were his last two of that season.)

I neglected to point out how knowing Josh (specifically, his "style" and sense of humour) helped me with solving the puzzle. For instance, on "Famous Christian" I figured it would either be "Luke" as a reference to his son or a play where it wasn't a Christian in the pray-to-get-to-heaven sense but a reference to some comic book/superhero kind of person like, well Christian Bale. So I was helped by that bias.

Now if I can just get Will Shortz to start commenting on SoSG then maybe I can nail down NY Times crosswords easier.